Common Challenge

So you have just recently discovered that you no longer fit in the corporate world and want to live a life of a successful hot internet startup CEO? Soon after you come to the conclusion that to accomplish your newly chosen goal you need to make more time. You need to stretch the day to fit all new tasks that just need to be done so you can go down that road and hit the target that is luring you so strongly. You start to do research on the internet, add RSS feeds from different blogs to your favorite reader and soon after you find yourself having 1000+ unread entries. To cope with all the ‘new’ in your life, you learn GTD and organize your life into lists that have more and more tasks on them. The problem is… your daytime job with its urgent and important tasks just stands in your way to happiness. To make things worse, your office that once has been a dream place to spend time in, all of a sudden become a dull area with literally nothing interesting about it and you just can not stand it anymore.

To make things more interesting for you, the next step you decide to take is to do some of the ’startup’ tasks at your office. Now, that may get plain ugly when your boss learns of this, right? Just as cheating on your dear one leads to disaster, this situation may end up the same way. If this description seems familiar to you, well… TOO BAD! You just have to pull yourself together and make your dreams come true! The sooner you do that, the better for you and your mental health

To be honest, here in dooyt, we are in the same position. We have our daytime jobs with all the incentive bonuses and salaries that pay our bills. We just cannot fire our bosses and jump on to the fast track to success. We have to merge the two worlds together. One being the daytime job and the other - the startup endeavor. Of course I do not suggest here to push the limits to extremes and cheat on your boss to the point when he learns of it and sacks you on the spot. There are lots of tools and techniques out there that enable people to be more effective and achieve more in less time. If you have not read or listened to any book on this subject a good starting point would be to find some works of Brian Tracy or David Allen. If you are having problems finding enough time to do all important things, refer to The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss for inspiration on the art of outsourcing non-critical tasks. To be honest I find many of the tips from those authors to be very effective and they really make a difference for me.

If you are reading to this post and find yourself in a similar situation, please comment on this article with your insights on how you deal with these kinds of issues. Do you cheat on your boss? What other books or blogs do you think are worth reading?

In time of mass Internet adoption, free product and capital flow, we came to believe that the world is small. The possibility of doing business with customers being thousands of kilometers away and instantly getting in touch with people we barely new 5 min ago creates an illusion of being in the same room with the whole world. Digg, Facebook, Twitter, ubiquitous blogs and e-commerce - it really makes The Global Village a fact. Actually, having a video call over Skype with my friend in the UK feels pretty much the same as actually inviting him to my place. And of course I can get to know pretty much everyone in the world in less than 6 steps. So the world is small after all.

Really?

Recently I discovered that commenting posts on blogs like Techcrunch or Scobleizer (an important part of socially-aware-web-individual’s daily activities) only makes sense if you can be one of the first 20 commenters. Then someone actually reads what you wrote. To be one of the first 20 you have to read the post pretty much right after it’s online. When it’s fresh. The other observation I made is that my Twitter feed dies about 12pm - I only use Twitter to track the bloggers I’m interested in, and they, well - go to bed around that time. On the other hand - it’s most active around 8-11pm, and that’s the time when I should go to bed.

The world today is not 3D (unfortunately). It’s 4D - time being it’s fourth dimension. And the web is making me more and more aware of it. Unless you, just like RTM inventors, have “Interesting sleeping patterns” it’s hard to keep up with Pete Cashmore or Louis Gray. And we of course do not want to drop dead because of our work or blogging. The problem is not as simple as ‘not being in Silicon Valley is not cool’ or that you need to drink beer with A-list bloggers to get some buzz about your company. It’s influencing every part of doing business over the web: PR, advertising, customer service, invoicing (was it this month or next already?) - creating problems everywhere. We can deal with them, maybe using Internet Time, but they’re still there for thousands of businesses and bloggers around the world. Anyone about to solve them all?

Yup! So we did update our webpage after all. It’s been a while since the promised date of 31/03/2008 but we were busy designing the GUI for the beta release of dooyt.com. As you may have noticed the colors and the logo changed. Well… this time in fact it is a logo, not just a mockup done in PowerPoint.

Our idea behind the logo was that it should somehow show the ‘community’ aspect of dooyt.com. In our (or at least my) opinion the three little people depict just that - the community. In the world of web 2.0 an active community is by far the main and most important factor to website’s success. We wanted to express that. Now that we’ve underlined the community, our responsibility is to make sure the contributors are active. That’s probably not going to be easy but we’ll try our best We think that the design of and the concept behind dooyt.com will help in reaching that goal. Of course we invite everyone to submit their opinions and ideas once the beta starts. Now it just plain doesn’t make sense (too early) but if you already wish to send us some comments, please do so under this entry.

Moving on to the second change on www.dooyt.com, you may expect the final website to be in a blue/gray theme. Why did we choose to go that way? Well… First of all we wanted the design to be ‘light’ and easy to the eye. We were also inspired by designs and colors of webpages like www.apple.com or www.rememberthemilk.com which are both easy to user’s eyes and very functional. We also wanted to avoid a very popular web 2.0 trend of using intense colors and thus creating an eye-candy look and feel.

We will write more on the functional design of dooyt.com later once we’re close to finalizing it.

I guess that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more updates from blog.dooyt.com!

Now, I have decided to really immerse in all social trends on the web. That means I just got an account on… twitter(!). Ok, I know I’m a bit behind, but this is (kind of) my point. Do we (social web-apps developers) really have to use everything that is on top right now? Do we have to set up an account in the just-released-so-hot-new-service? Because it definitely takes more time than an average web-worker can afford.

The answer, as one of my university professors usually said, is probably same as always: It depends. For instance, in our team of 3, I’m the one responsible for (among making coffee, running with papers and other super-important stuff) marketing & PR (whoaa - do we need PR? - yes we do). That means reading tons of blog posts, twitts and other junk every day. But it’s supposed to be 2 way communication, if it’s to cause us any good, so I also have to get to know some people. And Twitter is one of the places I can stalk them (yea!) and communicate with them (haven’t figured that one out yet…). For instance, Robert Scoble is following me on twitter 9 minutes after I started following him - maybe if I shout loud enough he’ll hear me and mention us in one of his posts (no, I’m not naive enough to think it’ll work this way, it’s just a rhetorical figure).

The conclusion: I don’t know if Twitter will work for us, but as web entrepreneurs we have to BE on the social web, not JUST work there - if we want to be heard. And for me it means setting tons more of accounts and trying services I (sometimes) think are complete rubbish.

And BTW, you can follow me on Twitter HERE>>.

Update:

I also set up an account on Blip.pl, polish clone of Twitter. You can stalk me here.

the dip

from time to time we have a moment during our projects (both professional and personal), that we think we reached a dead end. this might be a straightforward situation (there is no chance to proceed, there are obstacles that we cannot overcome) or something what is called a dip.

I have recently read a little book by Seith Godin titled ‘the dip’ and it talks about exactly this situation. as the book’s subtitle reads - it is about when to quit, and when to proceed.

the illustration of the dip is a place where you are before mounting the success mountain.

it could be some kind of obstacle that you might need to figure out how to overcome, and as soon as you have done it things roll from there. but sometimes the dip is so deep that we cannot see the mountain at the horizon, only a dark wall in front.

how do we distinguish between a dip and a dead end?

more to come…

One of the basic challenges of ’starting-up’ is loosing momentum. In the beginning everything is easy, you have plenty of energy and bright future ahead. Unfortunately, soon the everyday pains come by and you have to simply go through them. Many of those are things you wanted to avoid by setting up your company: dealing with unwanted partners, unproductive paperwork, doing things that are simply not inspiring. This is where rhythm becomes so important. It’s essential to move on every day - even a smallest step. You also have to monitor yourself, whether you’re actually making any real progress everyday.

This is where good project management methodology helps. We looked at quite a few, while starting Dooyt, we also had some experience with waterfall methods. After lots of discussions (which involved rapid hand movement ) we chose SCRUM. I’m not going to cover it fully here, you can get plenty of information on Scrum Alliance website. SCRUM has three significant advantages over other methods. It’s simple - you set the goals, team takes them on and produces functionalities. It’s lightweight - you don’t need fancy software to implement it (in fact a whiteboard and a pen would be quite enough) - all we use is a spreadsheet with 3 tabs. It focuses on the rhythm - everyday every team members report in short words three things: 1. What she/he accomplished yesterday, 2. What tasks are planned for today, 3. Are there any possible obstacles in meeting goals.

Scrum has other advantages as well - reducing development time and increasing ROI to name just a couple, but those three are the most important, because they MAKE you and every other team member to keep the rhythm. And this is what makes things roll.

It took me a long time to write this post. 99% of this time was thinking how to do it the best possible way. 1% was actually doing it. Without this 1% it wouldn’t be possible for you to read this post, which would make the whole effort pointless. It’s quite an often thing, that just 1% of what you do makes the whole thing matter. Which doesn’t make the other 99% any less important.

So much for an introduction
Even though this post is coming out in march ‘08, and it says: The art of the start, it doesn’t mean we’re just beginning. In fact - we’re half-way done.
We started around 6 months ago with some ideas, plenty of energy and a bit of free lunch-time. We knew we wanted to make important products. Things that will really bring value to our customers. Things that will improve lives. 
It may sound big. And it is. Some of our ideas are dead simple. Some are so complicated even we still don’t understand what they’re actually going to do But all are going to influence the way users live and work. That’s our basic goal.

The topic is not accidental - a title of a book by Guy Kawasaki. We seem to do a lot of reading and we constantly learn, which can be important for you, as we will test some theories in practice, and will post our experiences on this blog.

So this blog is going to be about Dooyt (obviously - more on it soon), management (business, time, project) and at last but not least - starting up

Make sure you come back, at least once a week.